


Tales of the Skin Stitcher

by shsldespair



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Abortion, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Nastiness, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gen, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:15:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24463366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shsldespair/pseuds/shsldespair
Summary: Statements surrounding Beth Callahan, the alleged "Skin Stitcher".
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10





	Tales of the Skin Stitcher

**GERTRUDE**

Statement of Beth Callahan, also known as the Skin Stitcher, regarding her origins. Statement taken direct from subject in the field by Gertrude Robinson, date 13th March, 2003.

 **Statement Begins.** Into the tape, please.

**BETH**

Let’s start at the beginning. I was sixteen years old. I was pregnant. And I did not want to be.

Do you have any children, Archivist? No, that’s the wrong question. I think it’s probably different when you want them. Have you ever had an abortion? The modern methods are quite a bit cleaner than what I went through, sure. Can hardly even believe it’s even legal some places. What will never change, though, is the way it feels before. To be pregnant when you don’t want to be. To feel a thing growing inside of you, reshaping your body into its home, twisting and changing your insides. Knowing the only end to it is months away, by which point it’ll already have ruined you, and then it’ll rip its way out, a mess of blood and pain. In the first few weeks, they say it’s just a clump of cells, hardly the size of a grain of sand. Maybe so. The size, though, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. I swear I felt it from the very beginning. Like a parasite. I knew. And I needed it gone.

I used knitting needles. It’s what I had. I did it all on my own, didn’t dare ask for help, just laid in bed and hiked my skirt up to my waist. I was already showing at that point, not much, but just enough that if you knew, you could tell it wasn’t just a big meal. The sight of myself like that, my bloated belly, it made me sick to look at, itchy all over like I needed to rip my own skin off. More than anything, though, it melted away all my fear, made what I had to do very easy. I pushed the needles inside of myself as far as they would go, then further, swished ‘em around a bit for good measure, did it until I felt myself begin to bleed. It hurt, of course it hurt, but what I felt more than anything else was relief. This Hell was over. My body would finally be my own again.

Of course, it didn’t work out like that. The baby died, sure, but it was still inside of me, festering and rotting. Or maybe I punctured something. I never stopped bleeding. For days it went on, a red badge of shame in my pants. I had to do my laundry in secret or everyone would know what I had done. And it only got worse from there. The pain that had started when I first put the needles inside of me only got tighter, sharper, hotter, until I felt nothing else through my entire body, just a terrible agony originating from that awful thing still rotting inside my belly. I ran a fever, grew delirious. Foul-smelling things seeped out of me along with the blood, including a black, rotted lump of tissue I could swear looked like a tiny hand. I thought it was enough to kill it inside me, but as long as it remained I would always belong to it. I needed it gone, I needed it out, I needed it more than anything, it was all I could hear, ringing in my hears, deafening, _get it out_ , and in a fever pitch of desperation I began to claw at my belly as if I could dig through my skin. I would rip myself open if it meant being myself again. And then something happened, something strange and blessed- my fingers slipped through my skin like warm wax until I was wrist-deep in my own stomach. My hand clasped around the festering mass of tissue that was my womb and pulled it out. Cleanly, just like that. No blood, no pain, just me on the floor of my bedroom, clutching the wretched thing.

I could’ve written it off as a nightmare, a fever dream, but it worked. With nothing to feed it, the infection cleared up within a few days. I was free. When the sickness first set in, I thought it was a punishment from God. I could feel myself dying. I had killed my baby and this was the Hell I had wrought, that it would kill me back. I don’t think that’s true anymore. If there is a Christian God, one that watches over those that follow His rules, He had long since abandoned me. No, if the sickness was anything divine in nature, it came from a new God, the very same one that sang in my ears and showed me the way out, the God I would come to serve. The Flesh.

It was a few months before I had my first patient. She was another girl in town, barely my age, maybe younger, and I could tell she was in the family way. Not that she was showing yet, no, I knew because of her fear. Something happened that night, when I pulled the flesh from my body. I know now that it was the beginning of my journey to my new worship, but then, all I knew was I could tell a certain kind of fear on people, usually young women, a low underlying hum that colored their every movement. The Magdalene house where I had been sent was so thick with it it was distracting. All I wanted to do was sit and take it in. But I digress— the girl. She said she had heard that I had been pregnant but that I wasn’t anymore. That I had taken care of it. She asked if I could help her. I said, “Of course.” I told her I’d done it myself, that I could do it to her too.

She asked me when. I said, “Now’s good.”

I was surprised when I said it, and she was as well, but really, what preparation did I need? With this new power I had in my hands, I didn’t even need my knitting needles. We went back to her house, to her room, told her parents she was showing me some dresses for mending. Instead, I unbuttoned her dress and reached my hand inside of her, as smooth as it had gone inside of me, and took away her womb. I warned her she wouldn’t be able to have children after this, but she just closed her eyes, a look of pain coming over her, and said, “Just get it out.” You have to understand how desperate a woman would have to be, back then, to voluntarily be sterilized. It’s not like now, where a woman can just… decide she won’t be having babies. Like caged animals we were, gnawing off our own legs.

I still remember how she looked at me after, how terrified she was, not just of what was happening, but of me. Of what I’d done to her. She accused me of witchcraft, but I wasn’t worried. What was we supposed to do? Tell someone? Then she’d have to tell someone why I was there, and it wasn’t something you talk about. Her fear, though, her fear was delicious. I could feel my own terror reflected back at me and it made me whole again. Something about her being afraid of _me_ \- directing it at me- it made it so much sweeter. She sustained me a long time. I was never hungry long, anyway. The whisper network did its work. Every town needs an abortionist.

I was very successful. I even opened a little tailor’s shop as a front. I had always been good with a needle and thread. It’s funny, you know the word spinster? It comes from spinner, like spinning thread, because that was one of the few things apart from prostitution a woman without a husband could do to survive. Just like my own liberation, starting with knitting needles. Anyway. I got better at it over time, realized that if a patient was far enough along I didn’t have to take the entire womb to excise the fetus, I could take the baby out all its own. I also branched out over the years. I started with abortion, of course, but when it got around that I could do it bloodlessly just by reaching inside, people came to me with other requests. There are a lot of ways to take ownership of a body besides just getting it pregnant.

Take corsets- I watched those fall out of fashion. And everyone says it’s good, it’s liberation, we don’t have to wear those torture devices anymore, but is it? The standards haven’t gotten any lighter, we’re just supposed to look like that now, a perfect hourglass without the help of steel supports. It only took a few years before I had someone on my table asking to fix her waistline. Now, I can’t do anything about fat, but a length of intestine, a bit of liver… You’d be amazed how much space you can free up in a body when you try. And of course, if someone’s really desperate, I can always take a chunk of fat the old fashioned way, stitch the skin up good as new. That’s what they call me, actually. The Skin Stitcher. I suppose it’s better than The Fetus Snatcher or something.

I’ve been doing this a long time. I know I don’t look it, but I am a very old woman. I have sustained my body for over a hundred years now through fear... and Flesh. Parts I’ve borrowed from patients over the years. As long as I keep replacing things and as long as I keep feeding my God, I am protected from the ravages of age. Please don’t misunderstand, the youthful face is only because this is how I looked when all of this began. It’s not about vanity. I am not afraid of wrinkles. I imagine, though, that if the aging process were allowed to catch up to me it would not be a pleasant way to die, so I will keep replacing my body. I’ve had to diversify my methods through the years- most women would rather cross the Irish Sea or order a pill online these days- but work will never dry up. When your body is not your own, it becomes your prison. I am simply there to remove the offending Flesh, to help you cut your way out.

_[CLICK]_

**GERTRUDE**

Statement taken as part of my ongoing research into servants of the Flesh.

Final comments: It is difficult to do much further research into this statement considering the main events occurred over a century ago, and teenage abortionists are hardly the type of figures to be well-documented. There were enough Elizabeth Callahans born in Ireland in the year 1885 for birth records to be functionally useless. I was, however, able to find evidence of one of these Elizabeths being admitted to a Magdalene Laundry outside of Kinsale in 1901, which would be consistent with the timeline described. This Laundry did seem to have an unusually high fatality rate relative to its size, though whether this is her influence or she simply had the misfortune of being admitted to a particularly brutal example of these grisly institutions is hard to say.

Further research shows her name on the deed to a small commercial building in the same town, where she maintained her tailor’s shop until her lack of aging aroused undue suspicion in 1932. At that point, she would move her operation to Cork, where she still operates today. As Beth shows little interest in the macro dealings of her entity and tends to stay in one place, I am deeming her not an active threat. Besides, as most of her victims tend to come to her willingly, it is difficult to feel much pity for them. Still, I’ll make a note to check up on her shop every so often. It is good to keep an eye on Avatars regardless of their threat level, and in the event she does move operations again it could indicate an upcoming ritual.

_[CLICK]_

* * *

**ARCHIVIST**

I had initially opened this statement hoping, based on the name “Skin-Stitcher”, that I would be able to glean some more information on Nikola Orsinov and her ilk. Unfortunately, this appeared unconnected. Still, in the interest of thoroughness, I had someone go to check on her shop only to find it shuttered, with a note on the door indicating the owner was on holiday. While this could be chalked up to bad timing, a phone call to the building owner indicates that at some point in mid-2014, she paid the rest of the year’s rent in a lump sum, then paid another six months worth at the start of the year. He indicated that she did this once before, in 2008, but reopened again within a few weeks. As far as I can tell, no one has seen or heard from Beth Callahan since she shut her doors over eight months ago. If not for the two payments, we could say she’s disappeared entirely. Payments, I will add, which came via wire transfer from a newly opened account at a small community bank serving North Wales, including the area around Gwyndir forest.

Not so unconnected after all, perhaps.

**Author's Note:**

> had some thoughts on how magnus archives handles marginalized bodies and fear so i channeled them into a body horror lesbian.
> 
> i have more statement ideas revolving around beth's awful adventures so uh if you liked her let me know and maybe i'll write more


End file.
